At the age of ten, browsing through a public library, Andrew Wiles stumbled across the world's greatest mathematical puzzle. Fermat's Last Theorem had baffled mathematicians for over 300 years. Starting from that day, little Andrew dreamed of solving it.
The movie by J. Lynch and S. Singh (the latter spun off a well known best seller) shows how a juvenile obsession, which marked a whole life, moved Wiles to secretly work, sacrifying everything else, with the purpose of fulfilling the dream of his youth.
The film tells the story of his obsession, and how, thirty years later, he gave up everything to achieve his childhood dream.
In 1986, an extraordinary idea linked this irritating problem with one of the most profound ideas of modern mathematics: the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. The link meant that if Taniyama was true then so must be FLT.
When he heard, Wiles went after his childhood dream again. "I knew that the course of my life was changing."
For seven years, he worked in his attic study at Princeton, telling no one but his family. "My wife has only known me while I was working on Fermat", says Andrew. In June 1993 he reached his goal.